Heather has supported over 100 arts organisations as head of two of - - PDF document

Atraer a más público, visitantes, participantes, compradores, lectores, clientes…

Heather Maitland

Notes from a presentation given online by Heather Maitland at the Impact Hub Caracas, Venezuela, 19 June 2015

Heather Maitland is an arts consultant, author, trainer and Associate Fellow at the Centre for Cultural Policy Studies at the University of Warwick. Heather has supported over 100 arts organisations as head of two of the UK’s audience development agencies. Her current projects include benchmarking arts audiences in the Republic of Ireland and in Wales. She has just finished working on audience development with 31 contemporary music ensembles in 17 EU countries. Heather has nine books on arts marketing and audience development to her credit and writes a regular column for the Journal of Arts Marketing. She has delivered

• ver 200 seminars and workshops around the world.

This session Here are nine ideas for getting bigger audiences for your work. They are designed for artists and arts managers who have too much to do and not enough time to do it in. When I talk about audiences, I mean to include in that word visitors, participants, readers, purchasers, customers, viewers … anyone who engages with a cultural work. What is arts marketing? Sometimes people working in the arts and culture believe that marketing is a bad thing. They think that it means forcing artists to create more popular work and telling lies to people to persuade them to buy an artwork or a ticket. Not true!

Marketing is about helping artists and arts

• rganisations getting what they want. It’s also

about helping audiences, visitors, participants, readers and customers engage with your work. What does good cultural marketing look like? It looks completely different in every organisation. Each artist produces different work in a different place and has different goals and different

• audiences. Of course their marketing will be

different. The problem with marketing is there are so many things you could do. There is always one more place you could put a poster or another email you could send. If you see marketing as a list of things to do, you will never get them all done.

Marketing is about thinking and planning so you prioritise the things that work. Marketing is about understanding your work and the people who might want to engage with it. Then you can focus your limited time, money and energy on the tasks that will help you achieve your goals. Marketing is strongly linked to business planning. It is like the little tortoise riding on the back of the big business planning tortoise. The thinking and planning you have to do for marketing is very similar to the thinking and planning you need to do for your organisation as a whole. Creating a marketing plan is like going on a

• journey. First you have to decide where you want

to go. A business plan helps you decide what you want to achieve and what you need to do to reach those goals Here is the marketing planning journey, illustrated by artist Patrick Sanders

What t do we want t to achieve? eve? What t are we selling? g? Who do we want t to reach ch? Why shoul uld d people get involved? ved? How will we persuade uade them? How will we get that t message ge across?. When en? Was it worth th it? Patrick Sanders

9 x

So here are those nine ideas.

Focus on the things that will get you what you want

Exercise: Think about your work. Decide three things you want to have happened in five years’ time. Pages 12 to 15 of Thinking Big, a guide to strategic planning for cultural organisations, will help you think about this. Here’s a link to the book http://culturehive.co.uk/resources/thinking-big What are the tasks you should do to make these things happen? Make sure you prioritise these tasks in the future. Pages 19 to 25 of This Way Up, a guide to marketing planning for small arts organisations, will help you prioritise. Here’s the link: http://culturehive.co.uk/resources/marketing- planning-3

Talk to the right people

You can’t talk to everyone about your work. You need to choose the right people to prioritise.

• Pairs
• Decide who is A and who is B
• B: tell A the story of how you

crashed your car yesterday

• A: listen very carefully
• B: now tell A the same story

as though they are your 9 year old child

• A: what changed?

We do this all the time in our everyday lives. We did this exercise to prove it. Everything about the communication changed, just because we were talking to a different person. Targeting is about dividing up your communities into target groups. A target group is a bunch of people who have something in common so you can talk to everyone in that group about the same things in the same way using the same communication methods and stand a good chance of persuading them to engage with your work.

You can then choose to prioritise the target groups that will best help you achieve your goals.

Young people interested in music

But be careful! Here are two young people. They are both aged 15 and are interested in music. But you would never persuade them both by talking about the same things in the same way using the same communication methods. Their attitudes and beliefs about music are completely different so they will be persuaded by different messages delivered in different ways.

Target groups

• Young people 16-18 learning a musical

instrument and taking music exams

• Young people 16-18 playing in a rock

band

These are more useful target groups because they identify behaviours that reflect these different attitudes and beliefs. These behaviours tell you that you need to talk to them about different things in different ways.

Talk about the right things

So how do we know what to say to each of our target groups?

We need to walk in their shoes. If we understand how our audiences respond to

• ur work then we can talk about the right things

that will persuade them to engage. Dancers think about movement. Audiences think about what the movement tells them about how someone is feeling. Research shows that we all make complex decisions about someone’s emotions based on how they move. Scientists attached lights to a dancer’s head, shoulders, elbows, wrists, knees and ankles. That’s all the audience could see. Even so, they could tell what the dancer was doing and how they were feeling when they were doing it. In their minds, audiences try out the movements they are watching to test how they might feel. This is why we need to talk about emotions when we want to persuade someone to see dance.

That includes choosing emotional images. This image from Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company is beautiful but it tells us nothing about emotions. This picture from the same dance company is emotional and allows the viewer to make up stories about what might be happening. It’s much more persuasive.

Persuade them

Audiences for culture could be much bigger. Research shows that lots of people are interested but don’t engage.

Persuade me

That’s because no-one has tried to persuade them. Trying a new experience is risky and feels scary. Audiences are willing to take risks but only carefully calculated risks. They want to know that the good things they will get out of the experience will make those risks worthwhile. But we give them facts about our work. We assume that they can interpret those facts and work out for themselves how they will shape their experience. But most don’t know enough about the arts to do that.

Reasons not facts

We involve young people Young people become more confident and self-motivated when they get involved in our work.

Fact Reason

We need to give them reasons to engage, not facts. Here’s an example.

• Pairs
• Decide who is A and who is B
• A: Tell your partner a fact

about your work

• B: Turn it into a reason
• Now swap

We did this exercise to help us thing about the reasons why audiences might want to engage in

• ur own work.

Be different

What’s so special about you and your work? So many arts organisations look exactly the same. Here are four classical music groups. Which one would you want to see most?

• Pairs
• Decide who is A and who is B
• A: Tell your partner one thing

that makes your work different

• Now swap

We did this exercise to help us think about what makes our own work different. What makes your work different? How can you make sure the words and images you use communicate that difference. Pages 55 and 56 of This Way Up will help you think about this: http://culturehive.co.uk/resources/marketing- planning-3

Talk in the right way

We need to prioritise the communication tools that will help us achieve our goals.

There are so many communication tools we could use. Here are just some of the tools we could use

• nline. We need to prioritise the ones that are

used by our target groups and can best get our message across.

Keep in touch

We need to keep in touch to make sure our audiences come back to engage with us again.

Here’s a good example from Whistleblast Quartet in Ireland. Emails are cheap and easy to send. But we have to collect our audiences’ email

• addresses. Here’s how

Whistleblast Quartet collect email addresses on their website.

Choose the right image

Images say far more than words. So we need to choose images that communicate reasons and differences.

What is their music like?

What does this image tell you about Alerta Kamarada’s music? How does it communicate this? This image doesn’t communicate much. That’s for technical reasons. It’s too dark and you can’t see what’s happening. It’s taken during a performance and you very rarely get good photographs like that. The dance company realised this and set up a photoshoot.

Here’s the result. Lots of newspapers and magazines used this version because it tells the story clearly and there is lots of light and dark.

Be visible

We think everybody knows about us. But they don’t because we hide what we do. Only a quarter of respondents to a street survey in the town had ever been to this arts centre. More than a third didn’t know where it was. What would you do to make the arts centre visible to people in the town?

Here is another arts centre. You can see immediately that exciting things happen here. The lights at the top of the building are linked to the graphic equaliser on the sound desk. During a performance, they move with the music. This is a great way

• f creating a link between what goes on

inside the arts centre and anyone passing by.

9 x

So – those were my nine ideas.

9 ideas

• Focus on the things that get you what you want
• Talk to the right people
• Talk about the right things
• Persuade them
• Be different
• Talk in the right way
• Keep in touch
• Choose the right image
• Be visible

I hope that at all of them are interesting. But you need to do some thinking and planning to work out which ones will be useful and help you achieve your goals.

Doing things is much more fun than

• planning. But sometimes it’s a good idea

to think first! heather@heathermaitland.co.uk Here are some online resources to help you:  This Way Up, a guide to marketing the arts for small scale organisations and community groups http://culturehive.co.uk/resources/marketing-planning-3  The Marketing Map for touring companies http://marketingmap.a-m-a.co.uk/  Principles of segmentation http://culturehive.co.uk/resources/principles-of-segmentation- for-arts-marketing-and-audience-development  How to develop believable copy http://culturehive.co.uk/resources/how-to-develop- believable-copy  How to start a conversation with a mass audience http://culturehive.co.uk/resources/how- to-start-a-conversation-with-a-mass-audience  Visual persuasion, an article on choosing the best images http://culturehive.co.uk/resources/visual-persuasion-choosing-the-best-images  Ten top tips for social marketing http://culturehive.co.uk/wp- content/uploads/2013/10/Article-Ten-tip-tips-for-social-marketing-JAM31-Hardish-Virk- 2008.pdf  How to work with arts ambassadors http://culturehive.co.uk/resources/how-to-work-with- arts-ambassadors  A framework for your digital marketing strategy http://culturehive.co.uk/wp- content/uploads/2013/03/A-framework-for-your-digital-marketing-strategy..Susan- Hallam..2009.pdf  Building a loyal online community http://culturehive.co.uk/resources/building-a-loyal-

• nline-community

 Guide to measuring the return on your marketing investment http://culturehive.co.uk/resources/guide-to-measuring-return-on-investment-roi  How to promote live music on tour http://culturehive.co.uk/resources/how-to-promote-live-music  How to encourage audiences to take risks http://culturehive.co.uk/resources/how-to-get-your-audiences-and-visitors-to-take-greater- risks All these resources are in English, but here is a link to a Colombian organisation that supports creative industry start ups and has resources in Spanish: http://pranaincubadora.org/